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Rebecca Lieb's blog

Increasingly, brands are making room for executive content roles within their organizational structure. I’ve been studying content roles in the enterprise for some time now, and realize there’s an issue that’s not yet been addressed.

What’s the difference between content and content marketing?

There’s a much-vaunted, but rarely-seen-in-the-wild title of chief content officer. That role has executive purview and cross-functional authority.

A chief content officer has reach into R&D, product, HR, customer care, internal communications — all areas that don’t ladder up to marketing. And of course, the larger the organization, the greater the remove (or the silos) can be between departments and divisions.

A content marketing executive, in contrast, focuses on content exclusively within the confines of the marketing organization. While the content marketing chief (or vice president, director, etc.) can and almost certainly should work with divisions external to marketing to develop ideas, campaigns, input and inspiration for their initiatives, his or her strategic goal will always align with marketing’s mandate.

Content marketing will be designed and developed for marketing purposes, not for wider company initiatives, be they internal or external. This content will address various segments and/or personas at different stages in the purchase funnel. The content calendar will align with sales, customers, products, partners, trade shows and other externally focused initiatives.

Both types of content must align, of course. Voice, tone, look, feel, consistency, brand guidelines — all these and more are components on the governance that forms the guardrails of content strategy, no matter how broadly or narrowly focused.

The Blurring Line Between Content And Content Marketing

Having recently taken up the mantle of VP of content marketing at a large, global organization, the blurry area between “content” and “content marketing” became immediately apparent.

Are product demo videos content — or content marketing? What about product brochures? Web pages that document regular software updates and upgrades? The customer support and help sections of that same website? Product specification sheets? All these are (and require) content.

The questions come in when a content strategy is being mapped. A content strategy outlines governance, resources and processes. Part of my new challenge is determining how, where and if all these non-marketing pieces of content will fit into content marketing.

Do we create that content? Check it for look and feel, voice and tone, adherence to brand guidelines? Into which division and under whose purview fall the creators and administrators of non-marketing content?

There’s practically no business area that content doesn’t somehow bleed into. Many gray areas are emerging around the differences between content-content and content marketing.

What’s Ahead?

What will most likely emerge in the next year or so will be a career path for content professionals. Organizations are hiring content executives across the hierarchical spectrum. Editors and managing editors are almost commonplace now at companies ranging from Dell to Adidas.

Content marketing leads are also slowly, but surely, being created within the marketing department.

The growth path? The career apogee is, of course, a place in the C-suite. Will content take its place alongside the CEO, CMO, CTO, CIO, CRO, and other senior leadership roles?

It won’t happen soon, and it won’t happen everywhere. That’s simply not realistic. Corporate boards are hardly tripping over themselves to create new leadership roles (and the salaries that accompany them).

But increasingly forward-thinking organizations will realize that content isn’t just the atomic particle of marketing — it’s the currency with which we relate, interact, communicate and signal who we are and what we stand for.

Chief Content Officers will likely never be ubiquitous. But your chances of meeting one will likely become greater in the next couple of years.

Is content a DIY project, or is it a job better left to professionals?

Major brands want to create content marketing in-house. A couple of years ago I conducted research and asked major organizations such as Nestlé, GE, Adobe, IBM, and Coca-Cola what their preference was. Do it yourself, or farm it out to an agency? Everyone — 100 percent — of the executives I spoke with said their preference is in-house.

Their own staff know the company, the products, the culture, the brand, and the voice better than any outside handler ever could. But there’s another cold reality: resources. Few brands have the staff, time, and tools to meet all their content marketing demands internally.

There’s no shortage of agencies of all stripes that are eager to land your content business — ad agencies, PR agencies, “storytelling” agencies, PR agencies, content marketing shops, publishers’ in-house “content studios.” Service providers who are more than happy to create content for you are popping up like mushrooms after a strong rainfall.

What should you look for when engaging a content marketing agency? There are many criteria to consider. Here are the primary ones.

Why do you want an outside agency?
Content creation? Technical expertise you lack in-house (e.g., video production or mobile app development)? Strategy development? There are myriad reasons — nailing yours down will help to limit and focus the range of candidates.

Industry/vertical expertise
Don’t expect them to be peers in the knowledge sector, but they should possess a fundamental understanding of your vertical and/or industry, audience, region, or other individual criteria that are essential to your strategy. At the very least, they should be great listeners who are genuinely interested in you, not just the job.

Strategy before tactics
If a documented content strategy doesn’t already exist, you need one in hand (or to commission one) before diving into tactics with an outside provider. If you need to create one, make sure you choose an agency with a proven capability for developing strategic frameworks.
Reminder: “You need a Facebook page” is not a strategy. It’s a tactic.

Are the cobbler’s children wearing shoes?
Does the company practice what it preaches? Look at its own content marketing: the quality, quantity, channels, and responses to it. Its dedication to both strategy and practice will be demonstrated if it is as dedicated to content marketing as it likely claims to be.

Relevant case studies
Request them and evaluate them. Discuss them with the firm. Even if they don’t reflect your industry or vertical, the shop should help you to understand how they relate to your issues.

Talk with current and former clients
References matter. A reluctance to put you in touch with former (or current) clients also speaks volumes.

What are the success criteria?
Any plan or proposal should be accompanied by success criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs). How will the plan be measured? What indicates success? Look for metrics that impact business results (e.g., increased leads, revenue, shorter sales cycle), not mere volume metrics (30,000 likes!).

Content marketing: It’s certainly nothing new — it’s been with us since the dawn of marketing — but in digital channels, it’s rapidly changing and evolving. As content changes, so too do the policies, processes, priorities, and governance organizations require to effectively market with content. This applies not only to owned media channels — content has a strong gravitational pull that cannot be decoupled from earned and paid media.

Conversations these past few weeks about content with some preeminent brands and marketers have yielded insights worth sharing and pondering.

Content is the product

Susan Ridge, vice president of marketing and communications at Save the Children said in a recent meeting, “content is our product.” For most marketers, and for a significant number of brands, truer words were never spoken. As a non-profit charitable organization — and, for full disclosure, one of my clients — Save the Children doesn’t sell widgets or services. They craft stories and evoke emotions that ignite action, involvement, support and evangelism. What organization — even the ones that do have actual products — wouldn’t want the same of their customers, prospects, partners, and stakeholders?

Content achieves functionality

Twitter, Facebook, and Google now offer ‘Buy’ buttons on specific types of content, another indicator of the blurring of paid, owned, and earned media. This means content will increasingly be measured by its ability to convert, whether conversation (which is a desired action) is to bring customers in-store with inventory information, serve in an e-commerce capacity, or some other transaction of money and/or information. Still, it’s important to bear in mind that selling widgets is not the only KPI for content. Far from it. As I’ve previously mentioned, marketers are far too uncreative when it comes to establishing business-oriented KPIs for content. Please combine transactional functionality with other business metrics that matter, and that have dollar value.

Vertical matters

As visual and audio-visual content continue to rise in prominence thanks to the pervasiveness of mobile, designers, content creators, and UX experts will rethink orientation. Most print and banner images are oriented — and intended to be “read” — horizontally. Phones and handheld devices flip, of course, but the most intuitive interface, particularly for content snacking, is vertical. Plan accordingly.

Concept above product

This is not a new notion, but as more brands pile on to content marketing, it is a strategy worth repeating. The brands most successful in content marketing don’t talk about themselves very much. Everything General Electric does, for example, ladders up to “Ecomagination.” IBM’s concept is “Smarter Planet.” What’s yours? It should inspire and command interest, as well as involvement. It’s what the intended audience cares about.

Plan everything, and prepare for the unforeseen

Competent content marketers don’t just maintain highly detailed editorial calendars, but those calendars incorporate workflow, governance, and process. They also know that even the most tightly-orchestrated plans require leeway. Save the Children has designated staff on-call evenings, weekends, and holidays. Ebola, the Nepal earthquakes — all are calls-to-action to the content teams. Julie Ryan, executive director of worldwide digital marketing at 20th Century Fox, has a great addition to this piece of advice: “Don’t delegate everything to your agency. Things will come up.”

Organize for content

Content is too big, too important, and too ongoing a need to leave to happenstance. Putting organizational structure around content initiatives across paid, owned, and earned media is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it needs to be connected with the entirety of the enterprise. This week, Chris Murphy, managing editor of adidas’ newsroom, shared that he has no fewer than eight counterparts worldwide, and that the company moved media buyers to Portland (where he is based) so there can be closer collaboration between the media and content teams — in real-time.

On a personal note, I’m putting my money where my mouth is on that last point. This week I joined Teradata Marketing Applications as vice president of content marketing. I look forward to continuing to share insights and experience on content marketing and content strategy as a practitioner instead of as an analyst.

Over recent years, I’ve dedicated most of my effort and inquiry into content marketing and content strategy. I’ve written a book on the topic, as well as published more research in the field than any other individual.

Content is the distillation of all my professional passions. I’ve worked as a marketer, editor, journalist and analyst – all media, all the time. Since the beginning of digital I’ve been at the forefront of search, email, social media, digital advertising and digital publishing. All these (and more) couldn’t exist without content. All media, in fact, are containers for content.

I’ve also been studying how content works; how organizations plan, strategize and resource for it, and how content flows between paid, owned and earned media.

Today I put my brand-side hat on again and will begin to practice what I’ve been preaching. I’m proud to join Teradata Applications’ smart marketing team to oversee content for their global marketing operations.

Some friends and colleagues have asked what precipitated the move. Here are my reasons for making the change.

The opportunity to practice – and to put into action – the principles I’ve been studying and the analysis I’ve conducted.

Getting my hands dirty. As a strategic advisor I’ve been helping organizations from agencies to publishers to big-box retailers, financial institutions, healthcare and non-profits with their content strategies. Now I can be there for execution, too.

Going global – as a marketers, I was always involved with bringing brands across borders. While I speak internationally, the lion’s share of my work has been US-based since I crossed over from the brand side. Having lived and worked abroad extensively, I’m looking forward to taking up global initiatives again.

The position – organizations are only just beginning to organize for content. Few are a forward-looking as to put an executive in charge of content initiatives. I’ve researched this trend, and am excited to be one of the very first (of many to come) senior content marketing executives out in the wild.

So wish me luck, keep in touch, and I’ll keep you posted on insights from the inside.

Oh, and don’t think for a moment this move with move me out of the traffic. I fully intend (and am fully supported by my new employer) to keep speaking, writing, and staying thought-leader involved in all things digital marketing and media.

Nothing matters more in search engine optimization than content. Nothing.

And, while search visibility is a high priority for most brands (and as SEO providers rebrand themselves as “content marketing” companies), in a survey I conducted of more than 75 very senior marketing executives, most at Fortune 500 brands, SEO ranked dead last on their list of content marketing priorities.

Yet when it comes to having a well-optimized Web presence that’s visible to search engines, content is the alpha and omega of those efforts — more specifically, written content. Search engines can only crawl, index and understand text — not images, videos, podcasts, photos or any other type of graphic or multimedia content.

Keywords Are Key

Strong, optimized written copy is the most critical part of any SEO initiative.

But before the first sentence, tagline or headline are written, first venture into the heart of search optimization by identifying those keywords and key phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your website, articles, blog entries or other content initiatives, as well as for individual pages or specific pieces of content within a website or blog.

These are the words and phrases searchers use, not necessarily the ones you use back at the office when you’re talking with colleagues. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who bandies about terms such as “myocardial infraction.” The average Web searcher is more likely to seek information on “heart attack.”

The first step in the keyword research process is simply to brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business.

The trick here is to be specific. Forget broad terms like “shoes.” Focus instead on “running shoes” or “wedding shoes” or “nike running shoes” or “black patent leather high-heeled pumps.” It can be helpful to ask outsiders such as friends, family, clients or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Once the initial list is in hand, the next step is to determine how useful these terms really are. That’s where keyword research tools come in handy. (Both Google and Bing offer free keyword research tools. They require you to first sign up for an advertiser account, but no worries — they don’t compel you to run ads to use the free tools.)

By running the list of proposed keywords through a keyword research tool, you’ll learn how many searchers are actually conducting searches for a given word or term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other analytical information. These tools can also make you aware of words not on the list, or synonyms.

This information should narrow down the selections to a final list of keywords. Plug these into a spreadsheet that helps you to visualize at a glance each word or phrase’s conversion rate, search volume, and competition. This list helps narrow your focus and concentrate on the most important terms for your content.

Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “shoes” — this helps searchers get a general feel for the content. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“pink suede ballerina flats”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase or conversion funnel.

The best keywords have:

Strong relevance: terms for which you have content to support.

Relatively high search volume: terms people actually search for.

Relatively low competition: terms with a small number of search results.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to target, both for an overall content marketing initiative as well as for specific, smaller campaigns, it’s time to build content around those terms.

Bear in mind that search engines reward high-quality, original content more than virtually anything else out there. This is why content aggregation is fine (and relevant), but also why aggregation should almost always be regularly supplemented with well-written and researched original content.

A major way that search engine algorithms determine quality content is by examining how many links there are to specific pieces of content. Links can almost be considered “votes” vouching for quality content.

As far as search engines are concerned, this isn’t the most democratic process in the world: A link from a major metropolitan daily such as The New York Times is a higher-ranking vote than one from, say, a random tweet on Twitter. And links from sites that are semantically similar obviously make more sense — and therefore count more — than a link from something willy-nilly, say a site about politics linking to a page about Christmas cookie recipes.

One of the best strategies for getting people to link to you is, of course, to link to them.

Another approach is to follow relevant sites, blogs, online video channels and social-networking presences in your particular vertical and to comment on them, with appropriate and relevant links back to your own content.

Authoring articles and other types of content for third-party sites is also a valuable link strategy; most of these will have an “about the author” blurb that creates a link back to your own site or blog.

Internal links are also highly valuable, as links are what search engine spiders follow to find content in the first place. This is where site maps, tags, category pages, and well-considered taxonomies come in handy. They not only help visitors find relevant content, but help search engines find it, too.

Making content as sharable as possible is another valuable link-building strategy. It’s why so many sites contain those small icons encouraging visitors to “share on Facebook or LinkedIn or Digg or delicio.us,” or “tweet this.” Individually, social media links might not be as valuable as that New York Times citation, but many sites are seeing highly significant portions of their traffic originating from social media sites thanks to such efforts.

To this end, content authors should also be regarded as important link-building sources, particularly guest or third-party content contributors who can leverage links through their own websites or social networks to build links that benefit both parties.

Optimize Images And Multimedia Content

As stated above, search engines can’t “read” anything other than plain old text. They can’t “watch” a video, “listen” to an audio file, or assign a thousand words to a picture. So in order to optimize images and multimedia content for search, you have to create the words for the search engines.

What all these files types have in common is a need for clear, descriptive names or titles. These are not by all means the default name spit out by audio, video or image software — e.g., img230769.jpg. File names should be as descriptive as possible and match what the file represents.

If you’ve got a shot of an apple, for example, call it a “New York State Macintosh Apple” or “Ripe Harvest Orchard’s Macoun Apple,” not just plain old “apple.” For all a search engine knows, that “apple” could be a computer, or even a mobile phone.

Such descriptive names are not only found by search engine spiders, but often have the added advantage of appearing above, below or by the image itself, enhancing the user experience as well. Beyond any other optimization tactics, file names are accorded the most weight by search engines when it comes to ranking.

It should therefore come as no surprise that websites that regularly use multiple media files require a naming strategy or protocol to ensure consistency in the names used for graphics, audio or video.

After giving media files clear, descriptive names, don’t forget to add more descriptive text (or meta data) to the “alt” attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and to the point, like the file name.

This is an opportunity to go a little bit broader. That New York State apple, for example, might be from Olsen’s Orchards, or have been a product of the 2011 harvest. Or perhaps this is the place to indicate it’s a sweet, crisp, delicious and nutritious apple.

Online merchants might want to use this field to add information such as a manufacturer, product category, or UPC code. Let’s say you sell DVDs online. The name of the media file, in this case a photo of the cover art, would obviously be the title of the film. The “alt” attribute might include the names of the actors, director, studio, genre, release year, and any miscellaneous information such as “Academy Award Nominee.”

Perhaps the media file in question is named “Lady Gaga on American Idol.” The meta data might refer to the specific contestant in the competition, the names of other judges, or list some of the singer’s credits so the video shows up on more general searches by her fans.

Keyword strategy, combined with content marketing goals, will inform what type of additional data are added in this section.

A caption adjacent to an image or media file helps search engines to “understand” what the file is about, because adjacent text helps search engines contextualize what they’ve found and determine relevancy. The goal here is to function much like a newspaper or a magazine by adding keyword-rich captions to files.

This way, even if someone’s been careless and named an image file “Bass.jpg,” the adjacent text and caption can help a search engine understand if the image depicts a fish, a musical instrument, or a particular brand of shoe. This approach can be broadened to optimize the entire page the media file resides on to further increase the depth of context and relevancy.

In the case of images, file type matters. Photos should be rendered in jpg format, logos should be gif files. The reason is simply that these are standard formats that search engines “expect” to find. Search engines assume a gif file has 256 colors, standard for rendering graphics such as logos, while photos are rendered in millions of colors.

And when using logo files it’s all-important that the file be named with whatever is in that logo. No search engine is smart enough to deduce a simple gif file represents the logo for Bank of America, Ikea or Acme Exterminating.

While it can be labor-intensive, posting an HTML transcript of the dialogue in an audio or video file goes extraordinarily far in terms of optimizing the actual content of these media files.

Given the nature of the medium, it’s best to keep these files short, optimally five minutes or less (particularly in the case of video). Cutting longer media files into shorter segments not only eases viewing, but also affords additional opportunities to optimize the content and to provide extra, spider-able links between episodes or installments. This is particularly helpful in the case of episodic videos or podcasts.

Quality Matters. So Does Specificity

It’s not just content that reigns supreme in SEO — it’s quality content. Google’s own published guidelines on the topic say in essence that anyone hoping to rank well in search should write for their own visitors and users, not for the search engines themselves. The company is putting its algorithms solidly behind this recommendation.

In recent years we’ve seen “content farms,” websites that churn out mountains of garbage content to game the search engines and rise to the top of organic search results, plummet, and in many cases even disappear from search rankings.

Creating a lot of garbage is, of course, cheap and easy. Creating — and sustaining the creation of — high-quality content requires thought and investment (particularly when everyone else is trying to do it, too).

There are plenty of good reasons to keep content interesting, informative, entertaining, engaging, witty, useful, well-written and well-presented. There are dozens of reasons to have a strong taxonomy, descriptive and compelling headlines, tags and other organizational attributes. Now you can add search engine optimization to that list, too.

You may be creating and publishing the best content on the Web — but what does that matter if no one can find it?

If you’ve been around digital marketing since the Pleistocene Epoch, which correlates roughly with the mid-1990s, you’ve doubtless noticed a trend. Whenever a new channel or medium appears — and appears to have staying power — marketers’ first instinct seems always to be: throw a teenager at it.

During the Web 1.0 era, businesses were literally hiring the senior vice president’s 15-year-old nephew to build the company website. After all, he knew HTML. When email was ascendant, the first email program managers were a mere notch above summer interns. Search, social media — the operative fallacy is that these channels are for the young, and therefore only the dewiest of candidates are qualified to tackle them. The kernel of truth inside that fallacy is that newer channels are poorly understood, marketers (and the C-suite) are reluctant to allocate budget, so they take baby steps — with babies – and staff that may have tactical proficiency but are lacking in business experience, a strategic approach, an understanding of business goals, and overall maturity.

Now that web development, email, search, and social have developed into fully-fledged disciplines, they often have their own departments, staff, and oversight.

Content marketing? Not yet. Although without content there can be no paid, owned, or earned media, content doesn’t have a formal home in most organizations. Heck, 70 percent of organizations that practice content marketing don’t have a documented content strategy (according to my research, and corroborated by numerous other surveys). Without a formal strategy, there is rarely a budget, an org chart, or an infrastructure for content.

And this gives rise to another wave of amateurism. Too many organizations still subscribe to the “hire an unemployed journalist” school of content marketing. The reasoning is that this low-rent ink-stained scribe can churn out blog posts at a regular cadence, perhaps even thought-leadership pieces and some marketing copy.

I’ve got nothing against journalists — having been one myself for many years — but literacy and a flair for writing isn’t enough. This “content associate” (as these positions are often called) hasn’t been trained in marketing and too often doesn’t understand the core business they’re working for. Ideas such as personas and brand voice are alien to them. Recently, I was regaled with the story of a meal-delivery start-up whose in-house blogger not only wasn’t producing copy, but flat out confessed to having little interest in food, dining, or nutrition as a topic.

Even those organizations lucky enough to land talented, interested writers aren’t going the distance. Content isn’t text alone. Increasingly, it’s visual, and audio-visual. It requires the talents of editors, videographers, and graphic designers. If content is embedded in or reliant on apps, it can also require developers. The content price tag has just shot up considerably from that out of work journalist, hasn’t it?

Business will soon leave the era of content managed by barely-past-their-teens practitioners. Content will be formalized and institutionalized. Organizations are on the verge of realizing no content equals no email, no search, no website, no social media, no PR, and no advertising. All these are channels and containers for content.

Content is growing up. Budgets and organizational structure must and will rise accordingly.

Organizations are finally getting the memo: They need a clear, cogent, documented and well-communicated content strategy to govern their content marketing efforts.

My research (at Altimeter Group), corroborated by that of several other studies, indicates that currently 70 percent of companies practicing content marketing lack a documented strategy. But thankfully, this is slowly changing as the need to align content with actual goals, processes and procedures comes into focus.

What are the steps to outlining that documented strategy? The following is a list of my asks the moment I’m brought into an organization to help them develop a content strategy road map.

The first, and most critical part, is goals. What is content trying to achieve? What are the business reasons for creating and publishing content, and how are these goals aligned to broader company priorities?

This critical first step is determining the big “Why” of content. Without the why, there can be no strategy.

Part 2 may be secondary, but it’s of equal importance. It answers the question “How?” People, process, governance, tools, technologies, assets — all of these and more must be present and accounted for, aligned and communicated to numerous stakeholders. How is ongoing, but adheres to a broad procedural schema.

In order to determine Why and get to the How, these are my “Day One” requests when beginning a content strategy engagement.

List Of Tools & Technologies

What tools do you use to create content? To publish it? To store, archive, share and retrieve it? To optimize and measure it? What other tools do these tools have to play nice with?

This list might include Web or social analytics tools, SEO or SEM software, CRM solutions, marketing automation, even intranets and telephony software.

No tool or technology is an island anymore, so a holistic, 360-degree consideration of technology — what’s used today and what’s planned for deployment in the future — is essential.

Content Audit

A content audit is a painstaking, exacting exercise that many would be only too happy to skip. But you can’t.

If you don’t know where you are, you can’t chart the journey forward. A content audit is both a quantitative and, more importantly, a qualitative analysis of all the content for which your organization is responsible.

In order to conduct an audit, you’ll need a list of all your public-facing online properties, from websites to social media. When I conduct an audit I want to see your email marketing, your ad campaigns. I even (this surprises many of my clients) want to examine offline collateral, perhaps that big annual report or research study undertaken annually or semiannually.

It’s not enough to just have at the content itself. I’ll also request access to analytics software (Web, social, email, and so on). The purpose of an audit isn’t just to evaluate whether or not I like your content. I want to see if it’s being seen, found, used, shared and amplified — or not.

A good audit (they vary by purpose and type of engagement) is a 50-point diagnostic. They’re very deep and reveal often-surprising insights, not just about the content itself, but also requirements for the processes and technologies to create and sustain the flow of content. The goal is to define gaps and problems, as well as to identify strengths, and develop specific recommendations for improvement.

Stakeholder Interviews

The stakeholder interview is the most interesting part of developing a content strategy.

I’ll ask for a list of 10 to 15 stakeholders for in-depth interviews on content needs. What are their goals? Their wants and needs? Their vision of process? It’s usually up to my client to identify the stakeholders I’ll interview, but I don’t want all of them to be senior executives. I also want to speak with the techies, the creatives and tacticians to get a pragmatic, from-the-trenches perspective.

I don’t want to interview groups larger than two to three people (otherwise some will clam up), and I don’t want a senior executive present at all my conversations (self-censorship can be an issue).

While stakeholder interviews aren’t a democratic process, really asking people what they want and need around content can be incredibly revealing, and unveil very interesting levels of consensus.

There are, of course, other asks dependent on the size, scope and purpose of a content engagement strategy. But for anyone approaching their organization as a client in need of a content strategy, these three starting points are mandatory.

To market effectively requires a strategy, but a simple fact that eludes many marketers is that you are allowed to change the strategy. I hadn’t realized how intractable strategy is perceived to be until a few recent calls with clients, as well as a student writing a PhD thesis on content marketing, left me shaking my head. All expressed reluctance to commit to a documented content strategy lest priorities, processes, technologies, or other resources change. What then? Strategy is, after all, inscribed on stone tablets, Ten Commandments-style, when it’s documented. Or so the belief seems to go.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. In fact, this misbelief may be precisely what underlies the fact that 70 percent of organizations that practice content marketing don’t have a documented content strategy. Not only does my research as an analyst point to that statistic, but that 70 percent is corroborated by virtually every study out there.

There are a zillion and one reasons why a content marketing strategy can — indeed, will — change. Yet for some reason, marketers believe that once a strategy is established, it’s set in stone, immutable, and unalterable. In the rapidly shifting landscape of digital marketing and media, it’s essential to establish a strategy — to know why you are doing what you’re doing and how that goal will be achieved.

But that in no way precludes frequents checks, shifts, tweaks, and adjustments to stay on course. That’s how marketing becomes fluid, agile, sustainable, and successful.

How, why, and when should a content strategy change? Changes can be large or small, but the following are a few of the many reasons strategy should be reexamined, reevaluated, and re-jiggered to address priorities at hand.

Metrics/KPIs/optimization

What metrics and KPIs are important to gauging the success of a content strategy? Sales are an obvious choice, but there are a panoply of other KPIs that will take on greater or lesser significance as a strategy, as well as organizational priorities, evolve.

Content audit

Audits must be conducted periodically, ideally at least twice per year, to inform content strategy. Audits address what’s working, what’s not, and where gaps exist and how they might be filled.

Products/services

As offerings (and offers) change, so too will content strategy. Shifts might be seasonal, event- or launch-driven, or perhaps a new product line appeals to new customers with different needs, wants, and habits. If the organization itself isn’t static, content strategy will never be a set-it-and-forget-it box to tick.

Audience

Who comprises the target audience? Where are they online? Have they switched their alliance from one channel or platform to another, either in aggregate or by persona? Are personas and buyer profiles changing? What about their needs and wants? These and similar questions help to inform one of the most essential components of a content strategy: defining, and finding, who that content is supposed to reach and to influence.

Channels/formats/media

Ten years ago Instagram and Twitter weren’t part of anyone’s content strategy. They didn’t exist. Mobile was a department, not part and parcel of digital. Video, for many, was a nice to have, not a must-have. Shifts in platforms and the overall digital landscape necessitate periodic reevaluations of content strategy.

Resources

This can include tools, technology, personnel, budgets, processes — anything it takes to get content done. Content strategies don’t just define the goals content is intended to achieve, but also the procedure, processes and governance required to get there. Changes in resources necessitate changes to the overarching strategy.

Mere hours after Sen. Ted Cruz threw his hat into the ring and announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land, TedCruz.com went live. The site consists of one sober page, white text on a black background:

Unsurprisingly, social media lit up with (deservedly) derisive comments. The same would have been the case 10 years ago. Cruz is hardly the first politician to flop so spectacularly online. I can recall Rudy Giuliani’s MySpace profile during his presidential bid — the page was marked “private” so no one could see the posts.

But that was then. I don’t think that today it’s going too far to say that a candidate that doesn’t have the foresight to secure his own name (not to mention any and all related domains) doesn’t deserve my vote. It’s bad decision-making. It’s bad politics. It’s bad content, image, spin, and PR. What would have been a big “oops” 10 or 15 years ago is now indicative of someone who (politics aside) is not making informed decisions.

Because today, digital is too important to ignore. Barack Obama owes his two terms not just to a platform that resonated with the electorate, but with one of the all-time greatest digital CRM campaigns. The White House has a chief digital officer now.

Contrast that with Cruz, who doesn’t have a top-level domain in his name.

This choice, or oversight, or whatever you care to call it, speaks volumes about Ted Cruz as a leader. What kind of people has he brought on as campaign advisors if this critical element of his messaging has been completely overlooked? A president is only good as his lieutenants. It’s hard to imagine a candidate who can’t buy a web domain becoming the most powerful politician in the world and appointing a qualified cabinet.

I’m in the bittersweet process of transitioning out of my role as industry analyst at Altimeter Group. I plan to remain with the company until early summer, finishing obligations and projects for some wonderful clients, including research and strategy work, as well as public speaking.

Then I’ll strike out and do something new. What, exactly, is still TBD.

I’m sharing this news for two reasons. First, transparency. At Adobe Summit last week, it was awkward to meet old friends and new acquaintances and answer the “what do you do?” question. Yes, I’m still at Altimeter, but one foot is inching toward the door.

I also want to signal my availability. I’m pleased to be in talks with a diverse list of organizations: brands, analyst firms, and agencies. I’m considering a variety of options, from remaining an analyst to putting my practitioner hat back on in a senior marketing role. I am also taking on client projects (advisory and thought leadership), as well as booking speaking engagements.

I’ve also been asked to join a number of advisory boards, an exciting prospect (unless I remain an analyst, in which case that’s a non-starter). I’m energized, daunted, nostalgic and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, my head swimming with possibilities. It’s all good, and still very open-ended. I’m figuring this out while juggling a full workload and all the while maintaining my elite level frequent flyer status.

Working at Altimeter is one of the best jobs I ever had. I’m very proud of having produced a significant body of research on content marketing – more than any other researcher or analyst in the field – as well as my work in converged media. I’ve shared that knowledge in literally hundreds of keynotes and speeches on three continents, from major conferences to private events.

I’m also proud of my advisory and thought-leadership work with clients ranging from major banks, healthcare organizations, big-box retailers, and government agencies, to start-ups and non-profits. Recent clients include Home Depot, Adobe, Nestlé, Facebook, Gannett, Honeywell, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Anthem, American Express, IAB, as well as major ad and PR agencies.

I’m also honored to be frequently tapped for commentary by media outlets such as National Public Radio, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC when there’s breaking news about digital marketing or media.

And it will be my privilege to continue to contribute to the dialogue, the development, and the definitions of the disruptive technologies in marketing and media.

I’m also grateful. Charlene Li believed in me and took my career in an exciting new direction. Jeremiah Owyang supported me wholeheartedly and unconditionally as a fledgling analyst, and was an early co-author of a major piece of research. Brian Solis invited me to serve as editor of several of his reports, and to speak at his Pivot conference. The brilliant and talented Susan Etlinger is another co-author and collaborator. We published new research together just last week.

I couldn’t ask you to name a smarter, more supportive or inspirational group of colleagues. The research team has also been exceptional. If I look good at Altimeter, so much of that credit is due to crack researchers Christine Tran, Jessica Groopman and Jaimy Syzmanski (so many names I’m omitting….)

What’s next? I’ll keep you posted. Rest assured I’ll continue to research, write and speak under my own banner in the long term.